Fuck this new generation of gaming and all the fools who defend it as something worthwhile. Why are people stupid enough to continue pre-ordering games that will almost certainly be fuckin broken on release? Why are people hell bent on making these new consoles out to be so much better than the steaming piles of shit they are? I’ve actually had a staff member on x360a openly tell the forum members they should add me to ignore because I’m bitching about XB1 too much…in “the official bitching thread” for XB1! If you go against these fanboys, it’s like you’re speaking in tongues. You might as well be standing in a church on Sunday morning trying to talk people out of that religion bullshit. See my other blog for more on religion. On to the subject at hand…

It started with PS4, didn’t it? Then MS rushed the new Xbox, announced a bunch of excessive DRM and TV features, and were promptly told to fuck off by all the real gamers out there. However, the same stupid fucks were still in charge and had a fancy UI designed based on the plan of ramming Kinect down everyone’s throats, and just expecting gamers to just sit back and eat it. Again, they were proven wrong. What are we left with? Nearly every game that releases has some kind of issues and ridiculously huge day one patches, essentially making the discs worthless to collectors who actually intend to play them 20 or so years down the road and forcing people to connect online as the DRM would have anyway. Well played, assholes.

That wasn’t bad enough though. They put all the money into the bullshit Kinect hardware and couldn’t even put halfway current tech in the box itself. Hell, they made the thing the size of a VCR (again) and STILL couldn’t put the power supply inside, something Sony has been doing successfully for 4 fucking generations now. All anyone cares about these days is “oooh pretty graphics!” No concern for the fact that the shit planning, obsolete storage tech, and poor software devlopement makes everything just as slow as last gen. Arguably, it’s slower, since blu-ray causes every disc to require full install. Flash media is cheap enough. Why not put the games on flash memory similar to the way cartridges used ROM back in the day? Funny thing is Sony is likely profiting somehow from MS using BD tech. Ok, so we need to install the games. Fine, but giving everyone an internal drive that they can fill up with like 10 games, plus it’s slow as all hell because they couldn’t even be bothered to use an SATA3 chip on the goddamn motherboard!?!? In case you missed it, SATA2 was new tech around the time 360 was fucking new. It’s horribly obsolete, and 5400RPM drives have been around even longer. Those drives need to fucking disappear. It’s sickening that anyone still chooses them over the 7200RPM that’s been standard for 10-15 years or faster tech. Where were we? Oh, yes. Games are still slow. Even using a good USB 3.0 drive doesn’t always help. USB also requires extra CPU overhead that SATA doesn’t, from what I recall. I remember reading some speed comparisons a while back showing some games benefit from faster storage and some really don’t, proving the developers are still at fault as well.

The developers fail at every turn lately and everyone wants to forgive them and just patiently wait for patches to shit that used to work properly on day fucking one 99% of the time. You don’t buy a car and wait a month for some dude to come and update your radio so you can use it. Why accept a game that only partially works? Even when they fix things the updates this gen are ridiculously huge. Are they not compressing anything!?!? Don’t say it’s about the graphics resolution. First, title updates are supposed to fix bugs in the program code, not add new videos and hi-res fucking textures. Second, Even if you’re not a programmer/techie, you have to see that games going from being 4GB-8GB for 720P on Xbox360 to 25-60GB for 900-1080P on XB1 is FUCKING INSANE! The updates for XB1 games are bigger than entire 360 games for fuck sake. Not everyone has FIOS to get them done in 5 fucking minutes. I live on a 150 acre farm out in the country and the only thing available is DSL, and I spent 11 years stuck with dialup before that was even made available. I have a bulging disc in my neck along with back problems. I shouldn’t have to move to get decent internet, but this is the world we live in. Back on topic…

Why isn’t there more outrage over backward compatibility either? All those Xbox Live Arcade games people paid for and you can’t bring them to XB1. What’s the real reason behind that? The non-tech savvy folks may not realize this, but Microsoft is playing fucking games here. The original Xbox (where Halo and many MS fanboys started) was built with an x86 processor. That’s a PC processor. The Xbox360 has a PowerPC processor. Those are Mac processors. Think about that for a minute. MS built a game console with the same type of processor Apple puts in Mac computers. Now where did XB1 go? Back to a fucking PC processor (x86)!!!! Therein lies the biggest issue with backward compatibility. They were able to make some original Xbox games work on 360 because the 360 was actually a substantial enough upgrade over the original to handle the extra emulation required to run the old games. So essentially, MS not only built a weak ass box, they also switched CPU architecture to fuck us a little harder.

What they should’ve have done was build a new console on the same architecture that could handle 1080P at 60FPS solid as shit, load everything faster (making full installs actually worth doing in comparison to last gen), and still run the old games. Plus, give us dedicated fucking servers for all online gameplay, and controllers that won’t wear out so goddamn easily. Why throw away everything about 360 that worked? It took them a year and a half to add voice messages to fucking XB1! I wasn’t a fan of voice messages to begin with, since 98% of them are stupid fucks sending clan invites, but the point remains. They spent all those years honing the 360 dashboard to lets say a 9.5/10 then piss all over us with this joke of a new console and new UI. So we’re supposed to wait 5 years or more for them to make it good again? Get fucking real.

Plus, we still get stick drift and lame controller issues. They dumped all their time and resources into Kinect and DRM shit and failed to make solid controllers with good components, so we have the same problems we did on 360 instead of actually improving things. Oh, the idiots redesigned the standard mic for no reason and made a fancy proprietary plug though! The 360 started out with unique mic jacks, then abandoned them for standard plugs. Now they go back to weird proprietary shit? WHY? What was the point of spending time and money redesigning that shit? The default 360 headset was fine, but the XB1 one sucks horribly. All I ever wanted for with a 360 headset was a wireless one EXACTLY the same as the wired one but with no wire. I hate those stupid little bluetooth earpieces.

PS4 fails too, but not as hard. Where do I even begin? Well, I’ll give Sony props for keeping the PS3 UI and just updating it instead of completely fucking it up like MS. The only other thing I can praise is Earth Defense Force 4.1. It loads missions almost instantly and handles tons of action on screen while keeping the frame rate smooth as hell. Looks pretty good too, IMO. Now the bad. Why the fuck are there still no USB ports on the back of the unit!? And why are the ones in front right against the goddamn optical drive!? Certain USB sticks could block discs. Hell, the way the shell is formed, my Patriot USB stick wouldn’t even plug the fuck in. Nice job, idiots. And what the blue fuck is this trophy syncing bullshit every time you go to view them!? They don’t update to the online servers unless you go view your trophies to make them sync? That’s a level a fail I didn’t even think was possible. It’s actually worse than XB1 only popping achievements online. At least trophies fucking pop though. I’ve heard other games still have shit load times. The HDD is the same 5400RPM junk that’s in XB1 and probably plugged into a fucking obsolete SATA2 chip. The controllers still suck, still have bullshit built in batteries, and they changed the type of USB plug on them from what PS3 controllers used. $60 for a fucking controller and you don’t even get a cable with it. Then they refuse to offer a cheaper wired model without batteries and fucking bluetooth. Fuck the touch pad and bullshit light bar too. You really can’t turn off that battery draining shit!? The mic included is also ridiculously cheap and garbage. It looks like the one that came with my LG flip phone about 12 years back. Way to go Sony. Ram wireless controllers down everyone’s throats, but don’t include a wireless mic, you cheap fucks. At least the console is flat so you can set other consoles on top of it. The PS3 designs were fuckin stupid.

What about PC gaming? Let’s see. Half the games now are being ported from console and don’t run any goddamn better. I definitely saw some nasty shit about Dead Rising 3 when it released on PC. I gave up on PC gaming around the time Halo 2 released on PC. This was partly due to taking a liking to achievements on 360 when Halo 3 finally released, and partly due to being completely fed up with Windows, DirectX, and Microsoft’s stupid shit. When Halo 2 was released, it was one of the first games to pull that “Vista Only” shit. The hacking scene told MS to fuck off and made Halo 2 run on Windows XP anyway. Alas, PC gaming still sucks. Linux support is growing, hopefully more so with the Steam OS and Steam Machines coming. The developers tend to favor one video card manufacturer over the other and optimize shit to run better on those cards, if they optimize anything at all. I question why the video cards themselves are quite that intertwined with how the game actually runs, but whatever. Then you have shit go on where “oh, the game doesn’t work on these drivers. You need the nVidia drivers from 6 months ago. Those work perfectly.” Fuck off. Again, the fucking video card should not have such bloated fucking drivers that are breaking things all the goddamn time. Then you have the Windows version bullshit I mentioned before. Don’t forget about DirectX though. That’s about as bloated and fucked up as it gets. I’d swear every time I installed something I’d get some bullshit about the game or program needing a specific DirectX DLL from a specific month of the fucking year to function. Just having DirectX 8, 9, etc was never good enough. No, you need that DirectX DLL version from march 2011 for this program to function. Got that? Ok, now you need some bullshit Visual Studio runtime library that’s probably 4 years old and definitely should’ve been included in Windows in the first fucking place. What’s wrong with OpenGL? Oh, that’s right. Microsoft didn’t make it. Everyone has to use Microsoft’s bullshit. Here’s hoping Valve is on the road to ending that circle of terror.